Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [17]
They lived there only some two years, but that was enough to make the house live in history. It vanished, along with most of Hamburg, in the Second World War. Photographs show a five-storied tenement like hundreds of others in the city, covered with windows hanging crookedly from their frames, out of true like the whole place. From these windows wives leaned out to shout at their husbands and their urchins, the din of shouts and rough laughter echoing up and down the alley in a dreary human symphony all day long and into the night. Inside was the smell of smoked meat and cabbage and herring and unwashed tenants. This is the world Johannes Brahms awoke to. He was born in Specksgang on May 7, 1833.
JOHANN JAKOB laid out some of his scarce funds to announce in the Weekly News that he had produced a son.17 The baby was named for his grandfather and father: Johannes, son of Johann: Johnny Broom, a name as humble in German as in English. When he was a child, the family called him “Hannes” and “Jehann.” When he was grown and famous, his father would start signing himself “Johann” instead of Jakob18—the son re-creating the father. At the new baby’s christening at St. Michael’s on May 26, 1833, his grandfather Johann Brahms came down from Heide to stand as godfather along with Uncle Philip Detmering. Apparently, in his childhood Johannes would be taken on a visit to Heide only once, and old Johann died when the boy was six.
In 1833, the year Johannes was born, other figures and factors destined to appear in his chronicle had milestones large and small. The scattered German states took a step toward the old dream of unity by creating the Zollverein, the Customs Union (without Holstein and Hamburg, who were prideful of their freedom). Since the wars of the Napoleonic years and their negation in the 1814–15 Congress of Vienna, Europe had been generally peaceful; but it was an enforced peace, with great repressions and ensuing resentments simmering under the placid surface of what, in Germany and Austria, would be named the Biedermeier Era.
By the time of Brahms’s birth, music was becoming king of the arts, the position it would occupy for the rest of the century. That resulted above all from three generations of composers who had worked in Vienna—Josef Haydn, W. A. Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Schubert. In 1833 Beethoven had been dead only six years, but his memory loomed over living composers like an awesome ancestral presence. Schubert had died in Vienna a year after Beethoven, with his full stature yet to be understood.
Elsewhere in Europe in 1833, French composer Hector Berlioz was thirty and notorious, Frédéric Chopin twenty-three and finding his way in Paris, Franz Liszt twenty-two and worshipped, Gioacchino Rossini forty-one and retired, and Felix Mendelssohn twenty-four with some of his best work behind him. Meanwhile, Anton Bruckner was nine, Johann Strauss, Jr., eight, Josef Joachim two. Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi were both twenty, Verdi wondering if he was talented enough to write operas, Wagner convinced of his genius but not quite decided what to be a genius at. Clara Wieck of Leipzig was a famous piano prodigy at fourteen, shortly to become a sensation. Her future husband, Robert Schumann, was twenty-three, recently a piano student of Clara’s father, and had composed his astonishing first opuses for the piano. In 1834, Schumann would found the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and make it the most important journal in Europe promoting progressive composers.
The Brahmses’ second son and the last of three children was born in February 1835 and christened Friedrich, called Fritz. Apparently, that year Johann Jakob secured his first steady job; he began playing keyed bugle in the brass band of the Second Jäger-Bataillon of the Hamburg Bürgerwehr, the town militia. (The Free City had its own post office, diplomatic service, and military.) Johann Jakob prized his green uniform with the embroidered